Untitled, untitled, and again untitled.  There are many things in this world that cannot be named or pinned down; many things are felt, experienced, and expressed without categorization.  Those are the moments of life, the silent pauses in which connections are made and the inner life lived.   Every individual has these moments, and here we see the artist working her way through these moments, living, transmuting, translating, manifesting through and in material – her innermost being traversing and recreating these silences.  Dhanashri, being a visual artist, naturally takes to colour and the materiality of the same to do so.  Silences coming alive as colour and thickness and flow – the very viscosity of life . . .  And then she moves on to the next work . . . each work representing an emotion, of peace or silence, moving through her, often appearing spread thin across the canvas and sometimes coagulating thickly as emotions tend to do, on paper or board.  And each finally remaining un-titled, un-named. 

Devoid of objects and subjects, in Dhanashri’s works the very physicality of her presence is felt and ‘seen’ – at places in the violent caking of colours left unfinished, at places as lazy swirls of water in dying breezes.  As viewers standing before these works, we get drawn into her world of emotions, reverberating our own, but remaining finally unidentified.  The curator in me has always felt that art is finally experienced only in the ‘seen,’ not in the ‘explained.’

In life, one’s inability to capture emotions, feelings, transitions, and the difficulty in naming the same remain: inexpressible desires, wanting finalities, wanting closures.  But then that is perhaps the very genius of sentience.  Dhanashri seems to acknowledge this and it is through her abstractions that she translates them on canvas  – abstractions standing in for abstractions.

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